Thanks @ChrisUpchurch for sharing your experience.
I think this thread is becoming a mastermind group 
I’ve been learning a ton from all the comments so far!
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FWIW I fully endorse this approach 
People are ultimately motivated by 2 things:
- Avoidance of pain
- Pursuit of pleasure
Generally, avoiding pain (staying alive!) is a stronger motivator which is why I suggest addressing the lowest areas first. But if nothing is causing you to say “ouch!” then shifting to something else that is highly important is the way to go 
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I know this is becoming a bit … but I really have to get around to doing this. Keyboard Maestro Field Guide launches next week. WWDC a few weeks later. I’m going to checule a retreat in June, after all that.
There. I’ve said it.
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Happy dances all around for this group!!!
I underutilize KBM & cannot wait to dig. Same thing with BetterTouchTool. Thanks to you, Hazel grooves along!
Yes, please rest after - you deserve it!
Personal Retreat - July 2019
I recently did my third personal retreat. I got quite a bit out of my first two retreats earlier this year and I was really looking forward to this one.
Preparing for the Retreat
In his personal retreat video course, Mike Schmitz pretty strongly recommends going somewhere and getting away from the distractions of home for your retreat. Both of my previous retreats have been “offsite” and I think that it definitely helps. Not only does it eliminate distractions, I find it also helps me get a different perspective.
I’ve done my previous retreats in a room at a local hotel and a cabin at a state park. I liked the cabin quite a bit, but in July I figured it might be a bit too hot to enjoy the state park’s amenities (the high on the day I did the retreat was 100 degrees). Instead I found a nice loft on Airbnb just the other side of downtown from my apartment and booked it for two nights.
When I did my first personal retreat I made a last-minute decision to do it on paper, rather than electronically. I’ve kept doing the same for subsequent retreats. I brought the same Studio Neat Panobook I used for my last retreat and a Retro 51 Tornado pen. Though I did the retreat on paper, I also brought my iPad for reference material (and to do this writeup).
I headed over to the Airbnb in the late afternoon and took advantage of the good restaurants nearby to get some sushi for dinner. The next morning I got up early, took a walk, then dove into the retreat process.
For my previous retreats I watched Mike’s videos before going on the retreat and took a bunch of notes. During the retreat itself I just relied on my notes. This time I took advantage of the WiFi at my Airbnb to rewatch the videos while I was doing the retreat.
Core Values
The first exercise in the personal retreat course is to define your core values. Obviously, if they really are core values they’re not something that should be changing every three months, so I could probably get away with just a quick review of what I did last time. Nevertheless, I’ve found it useful to go through this exercise from scratch each time. Mike has some great prompts to get you thinking about what’s truly important to you. Comparing my answers this time around to the previous retreats they’ve been pretty stable and I haven’t made any changes to my core values as a result. However, going through the process has lead me to emphasize different values or parts of particular values each time.
Where are you right now?
This portion of the personal retreat course includes two exercises: listing all of your current commitments and responsibilities, and rating your satisfaction with various areas life in the Wheel of Life exercise. I find listing out my commitments helpful in getting a handle on what my responsibilities are. The Wheel of Life, not so much. This is the third time I’ve done this and I still haven’t found an approach to this that really resonates with me.
Designing the life you want to live
In contrast, designing the life you want to live is probably my favorite part of the retreat. It asks you to envision the life you want to be leading in five years. Mike has a great set of prompts to get you thinking about what you want your life be like in all sorts of different areas, from your job, to personal relationships, to where you live and how you spend your time. He asks you to envision what a day in your life will be like five years from now. When I did this during my first retreat I got so into it that I wrote out way more than could be done in a single day. Since being overly busy is not the sort of life I want to live five years from now, I’ve taken to imagining an entire week of my future life. This allows me to include all the elements I want to include while having it unfold a more pleasant and realistic pace.
The Retrospective
Having taken stock of where I am now and envisioned where I want to go, the last step before setting goals for the next 12 weeks is to look back at what I’ve done since the last retreat. This process starts with listing out your accomplishments during the past three months.
There always seems to be a mismatch between how little I feel like I accomplished and how much there is when I get it down on paper, but it was particularly acute this time around. I’d done quite a bit of travel during the past three months (I was on the road 24 days during that time). In addition to the time I spent traveling it took me a long time to get caught up after I got back. Nevertheless, I still managed to accomplish quite a bit, including some very significant things at work. It’s easier to dwell on the things that fell through the cracks, so an exercise like this that forces me to acknowledge the accomplishments is very helpful.
After listing your accomplishments, the next step is to reflect on what went well during the last three months and what could have gone better. Dealing with travel, and particularly the post-travel period definitely falls in the “could have gone better” category for me. I fell off the wagon when it came to block scheduling a couple of times and had trouble staying on top of my task management. Both of these definitely affected my productivity. Partway through the quarter I also ended up deciding to basically drop one of my 12 Week Year goals entirely, as I just didn’t have the time to dedicate to it while I was trying to dig out from the effects of travel.
I took a break for lunch at one of the nice restaurants in this part of town before diving into the last part of the retrospective. This involves asking: What should you start doing? What should you stop doing? and What should you keep doing?
Setting Your Goals
Before setting your goals, Mike advises taking stock of your existing commitments for the next 12 weeks. In a good illustration of why this is important, I realized that I’ve got almost as much travel coming up in the next three months as I did in the last three months. Given how much that travel disrupted my productivity and my 12 Week Year goals, realizing how much travel I had on tap led me to pull back on some of my goals.
I did still set three goals. Two of them are carried over from my last 12 Week Year; however, I scaled down a bit to take into account the impact of travel. One is fitness related, while the other is a goal to do better on my time blocking and task management. The third goal is a new one, replacing the one that I dropped partway through the last 12 week year. This new goal is to start the process of getting a professional certification. Getting the certification is going to be a longer term goal (the earliest I would take the certification exam is next spring). Because I’m going to be going through busy periods at work later this fall and again next spring I want to start studying for the exam now.
During my last personal retreat I chose some leading indicators for each of my goals (tracking how often I did the things that would lead to accomplishing each goal). I think that the leading indicators were useful, but I had too many of them, making it difficult to consistently track them all. I cut way back on the number of things I’m tracking this time around. Just four indicators in total (one each for two of the goals, and a pair for the third goal). This should be easier to keep track of and help me keep up with both my tracking and with progress on the goals themselves.
Executing the Plan
The final part of the personal retreat is to lay out your ideal week. This is an exercise that I really dove into the first time around, with a color coded Numbers document showing what I’d do every day of the week. However, I kind of skated on it this time around, just making a few minor tweaks to my existing spreadsheet.
Reflecting on the Retreat
I stayed a second night at the Airbnb (though I did pop back to my apartment for our monthly resident social event that evening) and headed home the next morning.
These retreats are very valuable for me. I continue to be grateful to Mike Schmitz for the personal retreat concept and for his excellent course, especially the great prompts that he’s incorporated into the course to get you thinking.The clarity around the core values and the vision of the future that continues to be very beneficial. In addition to the 12 Week Year goals, I’m also finding that I get other insights from the process.
For instance, while I’d known all the travel really threw me for a loop, the Retrospective part of the retreat helped me really appreciate the impact that it had on my productivity. Going forward I think I need to have a post-trip plan to help me catch up after being gone and I need to set aside time specifically for those post-trip activities. Another non-goal thing I got out of the retreat is that I need to do a really deep cleaning of my OmniFocus database. There are a lot of tasks and projects in there that need to be dropped or put into deep freeze.
All in all, another successful retreat!
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Always great to read your reviews. Will have mine this coming Saturday and looking forward to it!!
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And that’s it! Another one done!
This past Saturday I isolated myself from the world, and with no distractions, I did my third personal retreat. Taking the time to stop and think about the past, present and future is priceless.
IMHO, this time was even better. Though it’s true that the surprise factor was not there - it was my third time after all - this time I had past “data” I could compare things with. And that was so valuable.
I’ve been using pen, paper and… a whiteboard. This time was no exception. The whiteboard has been a key element of this day. It’s so powerful to walk around the room, talking out lout to yourself (LOL!) and jot loose ideas on the whiteboard. So many dots get connected in the process. Once this is done, it’s time to populate the personal retreat workbook.
Here are some of the lessons I learned from this one:
Core Values:
My core values haven’t changed a lot since the first time I did this back in January this year.
However, having done it for three times, I feel that this time I was able to perfectly describe them in a way that I relate so much more with.
I’ve got now seven little and yet punchy sentences that I feel truly motivated by. This is mainly because I’ve been refining the previous versions. I found there was value in spending some time thinking about the core values.
Future me:
This section is also an interesting one too.
I’ve never felt very comfortable describing my life in 5 years from now. This is not because I cannot daydream (oh, believe me when I say I can! 
). The reason I felt uncomfortable was mainly because parts of it sounded like I could not think big - some of these things I was already doing or could be achieved next year.
Doing this exercise this time however brought me some peace of mind. I finally accepted that my life does not need to be fully “different” in 5 years time (most likely it won’t). If today I wake up nearly every day between 5:45-6am it’s because I’ve developed a good (strong) habit. so it’s OK to want my future me to do it as well.
Similar to the core values, I feel I now have a compelling vision, described in a way that relate to entirely.
Retrospective & goal setting
These are 2 sections that, this time, I’ve decided to treat as one. I thought it was useful to reflect on what I did well and what can improve and based while defining my goals for the next quarter.
I left the place feeling happy with the goals, milestones and daily tasks defined.
On the next day, I sat down with a fresh pair of eyes and broke down daily tasks (per month/week) and set up measures for each.
Conclusion
These days are fantastic! Although this time I didn’t have that wow factor because I’ve done it before, I felt that what I left the day with was much more refined, better, and something I totally related to.
I find these days very intensive but ones that you return home fully energised.
Time to get all this done. I’ll report back again in October.
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Although I feel slightly bad for bumping an old thread, I just want to say:
- Thank you to @mikeschmitz for creating the Personal Retreat course
- Thank you to @ChrisUpchurch and @AFC for documenting their Personal Retreat experiences
- I will get a Personal Retreat done by the end of this month, and post my experience on this thread. Please badger me by private message if I do not. Hold me accountable by whatever means you deem appropriate.
Context: This year I commenced what was going to be the first year of a two-year church-based internship. However, it became clear to me in the second half of the year that it wasn’t a good fit for me, an outcome that I didn’t see coming. Nonetheless, I’m super thankful for the opportunity, because I’m able to go back to my previous job with a renewed sense of passion and purpose, and the internship revealed a lifelong health condition - usually diagnosed in children - that helps to explain a lot about how I’m wired.
Consequently, I’m certain that doing a Personal Retreat will be incredibly valuable for me.
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Preparing for the Retreat
On Monday 16 December, I started making preparations for my personal retreat. (I work a 9-5 but currently on holidays until the start of February.) I can say with confidence that I only did this because I made the above post to hold myself accountable.
Location
I identified that the staff and alumni club at my local university (where I studied a few years ago) might be a good location for my personal retreat, having worked as an intern for one of the university student organisations this year and making the most of the club’s facilities. It has ample seating, free water, a variety of hot and healthy lunch options available to purchase, and restrooms a stone’s throw away. In fact, the culture of the club is such that I feel comfortable leaving my personal belongings at one of the tables while stepping outside for a short time.
I toyed with the idea of travelling further afield for my personal retreat. However, the uni club is a short bus ride away from my house, and I travelled too much for my internship this year, so I decided to stay local.
Date
The university club was open until Friday 20 December, however, that day had a catastrophic fire risk and I had scheduled lunch with my parents at their place, which ended up being close enough to some serious bushfires to warrant heightened preparedness. Consequently, I scheduled my personal retreat for Thursday 19 December, even though the weather was going to be 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit).
Reviewing the Process
On Tuesday 17 December, I spent three or four hours reviewing my notes from the Personal Retreat course and distilling them into a pithy standard operating procedure (SOP) for doing personal retreats, that I could easily follow while doing the retreat itself.
What I Took
- WiFi-only iPad with personal retreat SOP downloaded
- Cellular Apple Watch (in case my parents needed to contact me in an emergency)
- Bose QC35 noise-cancelling headphones
- Dark chocolate, sardines and water
- Notepad and pen (to make the most of analog tools and engage a different part of my brain)
The Retreat
The uni club was mostly empty when I arrived at 1100, so I chose a table, set up my belongings, and used my Apple Watch to start playing some instrumental music through the Bose headphones
Core Values
30 minutes
In my SOP, I referenced a list of possible core values suggested by James Clear at https://jamesclear.com/core-values. Consequently, I planned to browse these to think about my own core values. However, I chose not to take my iPhone or anything I could access web pages with, so as to avoid distractions - but this meant I couldn’t access James Clear’s list.
Instead, I decided to brainstorm my virtual mentors - if I can use the phrase loosely - based on books and podcasts that have particularly resonated with me. For each mentor, I then identified one adjective that describes their primary message. For example:
- Jocko Willink: disciplined
- Sam Carpenter: systematic
- Michael Hyatt: focussed
This was a good start, and helped me to identify a draft list of core values
- Christian
- Systematic
- Focussed
- Disciplined
- Minimalist
- Growth-minded
- Simple
Where Are You Right Now?
15 minutes
I identified six areas of responsibility that cover my commitments
- Christian
- Son and friend
- Data scientist
- Health
- Finances
- Personal growth
I then tried to assess my performance in each of these areas. However, I felt that I would be better served by proceeding with the next three activities, rather than coming up with an assessment that would feel arbitrary to me.
Designing the Life You Want to Live
45 minutes
In the past, I’ve found that I can go completely overboard with these long-term visioning exercises, spending a lot of time working on a document that I never review or update. Consequently, I made the decision to think carefully about three dot points for each area of responsibility that would best describe my five-year vision.
As I started this exercise, I realised that I needed to be cognisant of the differences between:
- Principles: timeless and unchanging truths that govern your life.
- Vision: time-bound description of what you want your life to look like at a set point of time in the future (e.g. five years).
For example, since reading Work the System by Sam Carpenter, I have tried to come up with a page of general operating principles that describe these timeless truths that govern my life. However, I haven’t look at my previous iteration in multiple years, and I didn’t want to muddy my five-year vision with timeless truths that belonged in my general operating principles.
Of course, it is worth mentioning that part of one’s vision could be to live according to a given principle. However, a vision should also include long-term goals that one could achieve in the next five years. In other words, my general operating principles should be the same in five years, but my vision should be (somewhat) different.
Furthermore, I also identified that my vision should include areas of my life that I want to stay the same, in addition to areas of my life that I want to be different. For example, I really enjoy having lunch with my parents each Sunday, and it would be great if we could still do this in five years!
To keep my personal retreat manageable, I decided to skip updating my years-old list of general operating principles, and brainstormed my three dot points for each area of responsibility.
The Retrospective
50 minutes
I was excited by the prospect of considering my gain and my gap in each area of responsibility. To be clear about definitions:
- Gain: what you have achieved in the last time period (e.g. quarter).
- Gap: what you realistically could have achieved in the last time period, but didn’t.
Again, to keep my retreat manageable, I decided to brainstorm three gain dot points and three gap dot points for each area of responsibility.
I have a massive tendency to focus far more on how I can improve compared with my achievements, so I made a rule for myself that for each area of responsibility, I must write down three gains (achievements) before writing down three gaps (areas for improvement). While this rule went against my natural tendency and it was challenging, the unexpected benefit of this rule was that my gaps became a lot more realistic. For example, an unrealistic gap would be that I should have made a million dollars this year, given that I chose to complete an internship at around minimum wage. By contrast, one of my health-related gaps was that even though I saw a dietician, adopted the low-FODMAP diet and noticed resultant health improvements earlier this year, I have since abandoned the diet, and I would like to adopt it again.
Lunch
40 minutes
Mike advised taking a break after the previous retrospective, which was much needed. All this high-level thinking can be draining! I made the most of the lunch items available for purchase in the uni club.
The Prospective
50 minutes
Since the previous retrospective took me 50 minutes, I decided to split off this part of the retreat into its own section. Furthermore, I decided to call this section the prospective, since I’m now looking forward to the future. However, it’s dependent on data from the past, so choose whatever terminology floats your linguistic boat.
For each area of responsibility, I wrote down at least two things that I should:
- Start doing
- Stop doing
- Keep doing
I think this framework is an excellent way to consider changes going forward. In particular, I thoroughly appreciated Mike’s advice to pick at least one item to stop doing; so much so that I made myself pick two things! I also realised that the vision, the retrospective and the prospective were building on each other. It started to feel slightly repetitive, but I didn’t mind at all - it can be valuable to almost meditatively ponder these high-level questions.
There’s not much more to say about this exercise, except that its power is in its simplicity. As Tim Ferriss invites us to ask ourselves, "What would this look like if it were easy?”
Setting Your Goals
45 minutes
In hindsight, this is where I fell down a bit with the personal retreat.
I used the vision, retrospective and prospective to brainstorm a list of projects that I want to achieve, which was somewhat useful, but - in hindsight - not the purpose of the exercise.
See my overall reflections below for more detail.
Executing the Plan
25 minutes
Working a 9-5, I already have a good vision of what my ideal week looks like, although it was helpful to reflect on any iterative improvements I might be able to make to it.
Overall Reflections
What Went Well
- Making my first personal retreat manageable and removing barriers for entry by staying local and skipping exercises like reviewing my years-old list of general operating principles.
- Brainstorming my virtual mentors to spark creative juices and identify core values.
- Identifying the difference between my principles and my five-year vision.
- Completing the retrospective (gain and gap) and prospective (start, stop, keep) exercises; these were mentally taxing, but so valuable.
What I Could Improve
- Assessing my performance in each area of responsibility.
- Identifying up to three goals for the next quarter; I think the relationship between these goals and my ideal week is that I will spend one hour of focus work each morning moving the needle and working towards these goals. In hindsight, the reason I found it difficult to complete the goal-setting exercise is that I didn’t identify this one hour each morning as my “moving the needle time”.
- Scheduling my next personal retreat during my current personal retreat. I need to speak to my manager about taking the relevant time off, but in the future, I could do this before my current personal retreat.
To-Do
- Identifying my general operating principles and then reviewing them each personal retreat; I might use a book like Principles by Ray Dalio for this.
- Identifying up to three goals for the next quarter, and ensuring that I spend the moving the needle time only on one of these goals.
- Transcribing my handwritten personal retreat notes. (One of the drawbacks of handwritten personal retreats, but the benefits of analog are worth it!)
- Adding relevant tasks, projects, tags, etc. to OmniFocus, including “Move the Needle” projects.
Thanks
A massive thank you to @mikeschmitz for putting together the Personal Retreat course - I highly recommend it.
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Bumping this thread as I head to a small, cozy country town here in Western Australia.
It was just going to be a “getaway”, try some astrophotography, play some golf and drink red wine - all which will occur.
But as I start a new chapter career-wise (at 58!) a retreat might be a very good use of my time.
Thanks to @ChrisUpchurch, @AFC and @andrew.j.pfeiffer for your examples and experiences - super helpful.
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Oddly enough, my quarterly personal retreat is tomorrow. They’re a lot less interesting during the pandemic though. I just do them at my kitchen table.
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I could do that, just the wife and dog at home.
But current work has been mental so a different location will be nice plus I’ve been meaning to get to Nannup (the town) for quite a few years and never have.
I can feel myself relaxing as I type this and I still have the 4 hour drive ahead of me. 
Now just to get @mikeschmitz’s Course downloaded too! Hope he’s fixed the workbook! 
(just kidding Mike!)
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I read this article about Bill Gate’s Think Week years ago. I scheduled something similar for 5 days every other year. I found it extremely valuable. During on week I developed a new strategic technology program for the school I headed at that time. Sadly, I haven’t been able to take a Think Week for several years. I’m overdue!
Edit, Sorry David, I did not mean to respond to you, I was responding to the thread.
I did remove the labels from the Wheel of Life exercise. I also recorded all new videos for every lesson 
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It must be retreat season, I just did mine yesterday! Well, a mini version → the past few not much has changed (i.e. values, where I want to be in 5 years etc) so I went through it a bit quicker than some in the past. One thing that was nice was I’ve been using the same notebook for each one, and looking back at my first one in 2019 a lot of the things that were concerns then aren’t anymore. The process works!
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Same here. With this retreat I’ve completely filled a Studio Neat Panobook with retreat notes.
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It is for me. I usually start them on the solstices and equinoxes but I may start a bit earlier this year as I’ve got a lot to sort through. Sadly, I’ve never managed to really get away to do them so I do it at home. I do it mostly on paper but then transcribe my data into digital notes, originally in DEVONThink but now being converted to markdown and moved into Obsidian. Except a few things that I save as scanned PDFs. I have my review notes going back several years now. It’s interesting to me that the same things come up each year in their season. Probbaly more an indication of my typical long timeframe projects and goals than anything else. Details change but the major areas do not.
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Hey Mike, thanks for responding. Also, can I download the videos to play feom my iPad locally?
I’m at my retreat and internet is sloooow (which has its advantages) but also holds up the process.
Cheers
Yep, they should be downloadable now
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